The oil industry has been a big deal here in Alberta for decades; our two NHL teams are the Oilers and the Flames, and while the latter started out as the Atlanta Flames (named for the burning of Atlanta during the Civil War), they kept the nickname when they moved to Calgary because it was evocative of the flare stacks you see at oil refineries. And our provincial government has long been increasingly friendly to oil interests, to the point where it's fair to say they govern for their exclusive benefit.
For example, for many years the provincial Conservative Party had set the royalty rates on oil and gas at below the market value recommended by independent economists. They also were very lax about enforcing rules on setting aside money to clean up abandoned oil wells, so it's been a common practice for wells to be operated by small throwaway corporations who conveniently go bankrupt before having to properly rehabilitate spent well sites. Alberta has thousands of orphan wells, with an estimated cleanup cost in the tens of billions, according to this CBC story.
The corruption and entitlement of the Conservative Dynasty reached a peak in 2015, when there was just enough anger among the electorate (and division among conservative factions) to allow the New Democratic Party to form a government. They had a steep learning curve, but they were doing a pretty good job starting to repair the damage. But the old Progressive Conservative party and the Wild Rose Party merged to form the United Conservative Party and, with a very well-funded campaign vilifying the NDP, managed to retake a majority in the provincial legislature.
I had thought, at the time, that their long term game plan would stay the same: pander to the oil companies for as long as they can, and if worse comes to worst and their opponents get elected, blame all of the long-term damage from their own policies on the four years of their opponents trying to fix that damage, and get re-elected to continue oil service.
But lately that has shifted in a very sinister way. The very first thing the UCP did when they won the provincial election last year was announce a major business tax cut, ostensibly to help create jobs. (It did not have that effect. Husky Oil, one of the bigger beneficiaries of the reduced taxes, announced layoffs shortly afterwards.) And the UCP has been making truly devastating cuts to education and health care (yes, even health care, in the middle of a pandemic). And just last week, a government pension fund lost $4 billion on an unusually risky investment.
I don't think this is business as usual. I think what's happening is that the oil companies are recognizing that oil isn't coming back. Investment in and demand for sustainable alternative sources of energy continues to grow, while fossil fuels are becoming at the very least unfashionable. And the pandemic is, among other things, getting people talking about how blue the skies are and how maybe we don't need to fly or drive everywhere quite so much. This will pass, and -$35 a barrel oil futures are almost certainly an anomaly, but the future just doesn't look all that rosy for the oil industry, and they know it.
So what would you do, if you realized that your long term prospects for extracting wealth from the ground were effectively at an end? The sensible-self-interested strategy would be to liquidate all the assets you could from your oil-production business and get the hell out. Abandon your spent wells and leave someone else to pay for cleaning them up, but on a much bigger scale.
How big a scale? How about a whole province? For decades, it was worthwhile to keep Alberta functioning as an advanced oil-extraction support system. They needed smart engineers and geologists and technicians, and so it was worth it to spend money on education, and on a robust health care system to support the work force. But now, with the future of oil in doubt, investing in all these other things doesn't really benefit the oil interests. That's why the UCP is making such drastic cuts to everything, while dumping as much money into "supporting" the oil industry as possible. But those subsidies aren't going to attract new investment in developing Alberta's oil resources. It's part of the process of draining as much value out of the asset as possible while they still can, that asset being the provincial government itself. It's time for them to take the money and run.
It's not that Premier Jason Kenny and his cabinet are unaware that their policies will leave Alberta in a desperate mess when their term is over and they face another election. It's that they don't care. They may still have enough financial backing from the oil industry to hang on for another election, but even if they don't, they know they're in the endgame already. If they lose the next election, then the mess they've made will be someone else's problem. That was the plan all along.
Friday, 24 April 2020
Thursday, 2 April 2020
More on the Coerciveness of the Law
A friend asked me for my thoughts on this article, and I wrote a reply and posted it with a vague sense of deja vu. Turns out what I was typing to them was almost exactly the same argument I offered in this blog post.
But on rereading it and thinking about it, I realize there's a bit more I wanted to say about Professor Carter's argument, because there's something a bit misleading about it. Indeed, I think it's dead wrong on one level. Here's the passage I mean:
To begin with, I agree with Professor Carter about the seriousness of invoking the power of law. Every law is by definition a constraint upon someone's freedom, and we should be very reluctant to impose such constraints without good reason. As I've written many times before in this blog, the only reason that justifies such limits on freedom is that, on the balance, the law should make us more free than we would be without it; we invest some freedom here to enjoy greater freedoms elsewhere.
And Professor Carter is correct that enforcement of the law, even in a civil contract dispute, may ultimately end up involving violence. I could quibble that the sheriff, behaving lawfully, would not shoot the breacher for non-violent resistance, but the sad fact is that sheriffs and police officers also behave unlawfully sometimes, and use unwarranted force. And so there is always the possibility that invoking the power of the law could result in an escalation to violence.
But that is where I think his argument is dead wrong, because the risk of escalation to violence is not some special danger peculiar to law, but an inherent feature of human conflict. It's always possible that the person you're dealing with -- or an ally acting on your behalf -- might get violent, and so the caution that one should only invoke the power of law when willing to kill is misplaced. If you're in a contract dispute with the kind of person who is likely to violently resist lawful execution of a lawful judgment, then you're also dealing with someone who is likely to violently resist any other attempts you might make to vindicate your rights, whether or not you invoke the power of the law.
Let me back up a bit, though, because I want to make a distinction between Law and the law, and it's analogous to the difference between Science and the science. It always annoys me a bit when someone says "Science says Bigfoot doesn't exist" or "According to science, global warming is real," not because of whether I agree or not with the claim itself, but because Science doesn't say any such thing. Science isn't some authoritative canon of facts; it is a process for evaluating whether or not any particular theory about the world is consistent with the world.
But saying "According to the science, Bigfoot doesn't exist" is fine, because "the science" reads as shorthand for "the results of the science we have done on this particular question so far", a tacit acknowledgment that while the science we have done so far leads to the current conclusion, there may be other science yet to do that supersedes it.
Like Science, Law is not some canonical body of obligations, but rather a process. Specifically, Law is a process of dispute resolution, where the parties to a dispute present their evidence and arguments to a disinterested decision-maker, who considers their arguments and decides by applying generally accepted principles. These generally accepted principles, by the way, are often called the law, and I want to suggest here that this is just like the science, in that the current consensus on what rights and obligations exist is a result of the law-ful process we've done on the issue so far, not necessarily the final definitive pronouncement of Law Itself. Since Law is fundamentally a dispute resolution method, and there can be disputes about what the law should be, that can change. Statutes are struck down as unconstitutional, old precedents are overturned as values and understandings change. This is all part of how Law works. Law does nothing more and nothing less than resolve disputes.
(It's worth noting that in the ordinary course of things, Law also prevents disputes, because most of the time people have a pretty good idea of how a court will decide, and act accordingly. So, for example, people who might otherwise be tempted to breach a contractual promise choose not to, because they know they'll almost certainly lose if it goes to trial.)
All right, so maybe capital L-Law isn't coercive or violent, but what about the law, the various rules that may be in force at any given time? What about Professor Carter's example of the potentially violent consequences of enforcing a civil judgment? Or more to the point, what about the outright threat of imprisonment or even capital punishment that is supposed to deter people from defying the criminal law? How is that not a coercive use of violence?
At first glance, it certainly looks like one: "Don't do that, or we'll lock you up." And indeed, it's very useful for certain people to think of it that way, to see imprisonment as a consequence of criminal activity. And that "or else!" formula is exactly what coercion is all about, so it's quite naturally to think of the law as coercive. But it's a mistake to attribute that coercion to the law, because coercion is a background fact about nature, quite independent of the existence of Law. Laws can only constrain options, not create them (except by pruning away other options that interfere with their practical exercise).
Law does not empower the state to use violence against you. In lawless states, they have no trouble at all using violence. Rather, in rule-of-law countries, Law generally prohibits the state from punishing you, except when certain narrowly defined conditions are met. (Usually, those conditions include the requirement that the state prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you are guilty of some transgression.)
So again, even in criminal matters, Law is simply a process of dispute resolution. The prosecutor wants the accused to be locked up, and the accused wants to be set free. Both parties are given the opportunity to present their evidence and argument, and the court decides. If there's no dispute, there's no trial; either the prosecutor declines to bring charges (and the court isn't involved at all), or the accused pleads guilty, and the court's involvement is mostly ceremonial, giving a formal assent to the joint sentencing submission. (Mostly. Sometimes the judge wants to impose a harsher sentence than the prosecutor recommends. But in such cases, the judge can be thought of as trying to consider the interests of people not present but who could could be expected to dispute the sentence. Again, no dispute, no need to involve the court.)
I argue, then, that Law is not itself coercive at all, because all the coercion that exists is independent of law. All Law does is decide when coercion should be allowed, ideally with an eye to minimizing the total amount of coercion and maximizing freedom. The natural world is one in which we humans can and do coerce each other in many ways, and prohibiting the state from any coercion means permitting individuals and groups to engage in coercion with impunity. It's a difficult balance, to be sure, and doomed to imperfection. But the perfect is, after all, the enemy of the good.
But on rereading it and thinking about it, I realize there's a bit more I wanted to say about Professor Carter's argument, because there's something a bit misleading about it. Indeed, I think it's dead wrong on one level. Here's the passage I mean:
On the first day of law school, I tell my Contracts students never to argue for invoking the power of law except in a cause for which they are willing to kill. They are suitably astonished, and often annoyed. But I point out that even a breach of contract requires a judicial remedy; and if the breacher will not pay damages, the sheriff will sequester his house and goods; and if he resists the forced sale of his property, the sheriff might have to shoot him.
To begin with, I agree with Professor Carter about the seriousness of invoking the power of law. Every law is by definition a constraint upon someone's freedom, and we should be very reluctant to impose such constraints without good reason. As I've written many times before in this blog, the only reason that justifies such limits on freedom is that, on the balance, the law should make us more free than we would be without it; we invest some freedom here to enjoy greater freedoms elsewhere.
And Professor Carter is correct that enforcement of the law, even in a civil contract dispute, may ultimately end up involving violence. I could quibble that the sheriff, behaving lawfully, would not shoot the breacher for non-violent resistance, but the sad fact is that sheriffs and police officers also behave unlawfully sometimes, and use unwarranted force. And so there is always the possibility that invoking the power of the law could result in an escalation to violence.
But that is where I think his argument is dead wrong, because the risk of escalation to violence is not some special danger peculiar to law, but an inherent feature of human conflict. It's always possible that the person you're dealing with -- or an ally acting on your behalf -- might get violent, and so the caution that one should only invoke the power of law when willing to kill is misplaced. If you're in a contract dispute with the kind of person who is likely to violently resist lawful execution of a lawful judgment, then you're also dealing with someone who is likely to violently resist any other attempts you might make to vindicate your rights, whether or not you invoke the power of the law.
Let me back up a bit, though, because I want to make a distinction between Law and the law, and it's analogous to the difference between Science and the science. It always annoys me a bit when someone says "Science says Bigfoot doesn't exist" or "According to science, global warming is real," not because of whether I agree or not with the claim itself, but because Science doesn't say any such thing. Science isn't some authoritative canon of facts; it is a process for evaluating whether or not any particular theory about the world is consistent with the world.
But saying "According to the science, Bigfoot doesn't exist" is fine, because "the science" reads as shorthand for "the results of the science we have done on this particular question so far", a tacit acknowledgment that while the science we have done so far leads to the current conclusion, there may be other science yet to do that supersedes it.
Like Science, Law is not some canonical body of obligations, but rather a process. Specifically, Law is a process of dispute resolution, where the parties to a dispute present their evidence and arguments to a disinterested decision-maker, who considers their arguments and decides by applying generally accepted principles. These generally accepted principles, by the way, are often called the law, and I want to suggest here that this is just like the science, in that the current consensus on what rights and obligations exist is a result of the law-ful process we've done on the issue so far, not necessarily the final definitive pronouncement of Law Itself. Since Law is fundamentally a dispute resolution method, and there can be disputes about what the law should be, that can change. Statutes are struck down as unconstitutional, old precedents are overturned as values and understandings change. This is all part of how Law works. Law does nothing more and nothing less than resolve disputes.
(It's worth noting that in the ordinary course of things, Law also prevents disputes, because most of the time people have a pretty good idea of how a court will decide, and act accordingly. So, for example, people who might otherwise be tempted to breach a contractual promise choose not to, because they know they'll almost certainly lose if it goes to trial.)
All right, so maybe capital L-Law isn't coercive or violent, but what about the law, the various rules that may be in force at any given time? What about Professor Carter's example of the potentially violent consequences of enforcing a civil judgment? Or more to the point, what about the outright threat of imprisonment or even capital punishment that is supposed to deter people from defying the criminal law? How is that not a coercive use of violence?
At first glance, it certainly looks like one: "Don't do that, or we'll lock you up." And indeed, it's very useful for certain people to think of it that way, to see imprisonment as a consequence of criminal activity. And that "or else!" formula is exactly what coercion is all about, so it's quite naturally to think of the law as coercive. But it's a mistake to attribute that coercion to the law, because coercion is a background fact about nature, quite independent of the existence of Law. Laws can only constrain options, not create them (except by pruning away other options that interfere with their practical exercise).
Law does not empower the state to use violence against you. In lawless states, they have no trouble at all using violence. Rather, in rule-of-law countries, Law generally prohibits the state from punishing you, except when certain narrowly defined conditions are met. (Usually, those conditions include the requirement that the state prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you are guilty of some transgression.)
So again, even in criminal matters, Law is simply a process of dispute resolution. The prosecutor wants the accused to be locked up, and the accused wants to be set free. Both parties are given the opportunity to present their evidence and argument, and the court decides. If there's no dispute, there's no trial; either the prosecutor declines to bring charges (and the court isn't involved at all), or the accused pleads guilty, and the court's involvement is mostly ceremonial, giving a formal assent to the joint sentencing submission. (Mostly. Sometimes the judge wants to impose a harsher sentence than the prosecutor recommends. But in such cases, the judge can be thought of as trying to consider the interests of people not present but who could could be expected to dispute the sentence. Again, no dispute, no need to involve the court.)
I argue, then, that Law is not itself coercive at all, because all the coercion that exists is independent of law. All Law does is decide when coercion should be allowed, ideally with an eye to minimizing the total amount of coercion and maximizing freedom. The natural world is one in which we humans can and do coerce each other in many ways, and prohibiting the state from any coercion means permitting individuals and groups to engage in coercion with impunity. It's a difficult balance, to be sure, and doomed to imperfection. But the perfect is, after all, the enemy of the good.
Thursday, 21 November 2019
Writing
I started this blog for a couple of reasons. The main one, of course, was that I wanted to share my thoughts on things that interest me with anyone who cared to read what I had to say. But another was as a kind of writing workout, to address some of my weaknesses as a writer. For example, I tend to be more of an editor than a writer, meaning I will go back and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and polish, rather than actually finishing anything. So one of the exercises of this blog has been to just go ahead and post something for all to see, without waiting for it to be perfect (which it never ever will be).
My output here has dropped off somewhat, but for what I consider to be a good reason. I started writing a novel many years ago, and as it progressed, the urgency of finishing it has become greater and greater. I've had a good many ideas for blog posts, and my drafts folder still has about 40 titles in various stages of completion, but whenever I sit down to work on them, I realize I really should be finishing that novel instead. Now that I have finally finished the first draft, I can take a bit of a break from that urgency, and share some thoughts here again. In this post, the thoughts I'm going to share are about writing fiction.
I have found writing fiction to be immensely harder than writing the kinds of essays I've posted here, and for two main reasons.
First, it's just more work. When I'm writing an essay, I have to formulate a thesis, structure an argument, compose each sentence and each paragraph to flow from inference to inference so that the reader will be carried along towards the conclusions I've reached myself. In doing this, I need to choose which facts to include and which facts to ignore as irrelevant.
In fiction, I have to do all of this, plus I have to make up the facts. And that's not at all an easy thing to do. The novel I've been working on is in the fantasy genre (which is to say it's set in a world based on medieval Europe with some elements that could be described as magical), which you might think would make it easy since anything goes, but that's just not so. The facts have to fit together to create a coherent, believable world. The characters have to react to those facts in a way that properly advances the plot and develops the theme. All of this happens naturally in non-fiction, because we live in a world that already obeys natural law and there is a consistent reality that takes care of itself. In fiction you have to build it from scratch, and that's a lot of work.
Second, fiction is art, and I can't help but feel kind of self-conscious about putting out something to be admired for its aesthetic qualities. The essays I write here are about ideas, and I try to make my writing as transparent as possible, so that the ideas are front and center. I may occasionally include what I think are clever or elegant turns of phrase, but ultimately they're supposed to be there in support of the ideas, rather than to be admired in their own right.
I don't feel self-conscious about the ideas because ideas don't belong to me; they're not my creations. Sometimes, I might have thoughts that no one else seems to have thought of before (or at least which don't seem to be in wide circulation yet), but I never feel as if I have created them. It's more like I've discovered them, like I just happen to have been lucky enough to notice something that was there to be noticed by whoever happened to look in the right direction in the right light. I'm happy to share these things un-self-consciously, but fiction? In fiction I'm saying, "Here's a world and some characters and a sequence of events that I created and I think they're good enough for you to devote some attention to." And I feel really awkward about doing that.
I'm not finished with this blog, not by a long shot. I still have lots of things I'll be wanting to write about here, and insights from struggling with fiction just adds to that list.
My output here has dropped off somewhat, but for what I consider to be a good reason. I started writing a novel many years ago, and as it progressed, the urgency of finishing it has become greater and greater. I've had a good many ideas for blog posts, and my drafts folder still has about 40 titles in various stages of completion, but whenever I sit down to work on them, I realize I really should be finishing that novel instead. Now that I have finally finished the first draft, I can take a bit of a break from that urgency, and share some thoughts here again. In this post, the thoughts I'm going to share are about writing fiction.
I have found writing fiction to be immensely harder than writing the kinds of essays I've posted here, and for two main reasons.
First, it's just more work. When I'm writing an essay, I have to formulate a thesis, structure an argument, compose each sentence and each paragraph to flow from inference to inference so that the reader will be carried along towards the conclusions I've reached myself. In doing this, I need to choose which facts to include and which facts to ignore as irrelevant.
In fiction, I have to do all of this, plus I have to make up the facts. And that's not at all an easy thing to do. The novel I've been working on is in the fantasy genre (which is to say it's set in a world based on medieval Europe with some elements that could be described as magical), which you might think would make it easy since anything goes, but that's just not so. The facts have to fit together to create a coherent, believable world. The characters have to react to those facts in a way that properly advances the plot and develops the theme. All of this happens naturally in non-fiction, because we live in a world that already obeys natural law and there is a consistent reality that takes care of itself. In fiction you have to build it from scratch, and that's a lot of work.
Second, fiction is art, and I can't help but feel kind of self-conscious about putting out something to be admired for its aesthetic qualities. The essays I write here are about ideas, and I try to make my writing as transparent as possible, so that the ideas are front and center. I may occasionally include what I think are clever or elegant turns of phrase, but ultimately they're supposed to be there in support of the ideas, rather than to be admired in their own right.
I don't feel self-conscious about the ideas because ideas don't belong to me; they're not my creations. Sometimes, I might have thoughts that no one else seems to have thought of before (or at least which don't seem to be in wide circulation yet), but I never feel as if I have created them. It's more like I've discovered them, like I just happen to have been lucky enough to notice something that was there to be noticed by whoever happened to look in the right direction in the right light. I'm happy to share these things un-self-consciously, but fiction? In fiction I'm saying, "Here's a world and some characters and a sequence of events that I created and I think they're good enough for you to devote some attention to." And I feel really awkward about doing that.
I'm not finished with this blog, not by a long shot. I still have lots of things I'll be wanting to write about here, and insights from struggling with fiction just adds to that list.
Saturday, 14 September 2019
Moral Inversion
I am not sure what to make of this strange pattern I've noticed recently. Not that it's a new pattern, just that I've become more aware of it.
Example One: A friend was complaining about the previous provincial government, and claimed they were trying to turn Alberta into a communist state. I asked him to elaborate, and he said something about the old communist slogan, "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need." Not that the NDP government ever cited that slogan, mind you. Just that he seemed to think they adhered to that as an ideal, and so that made them communist and therefore bad.
Example Two: In another conversation with a complete stranger online who expressed the opinion that racists and fascists deserved to die, when I said I didn't care what they deserved and the reason to oppose them is to protect their victims, not to mete out just deserts to people we think deserve punishment, he said, and I quote "You're not a good person, don't act like it."
I can sort of understand at least some of the genesis of the first example. Communism does not exactly have a great historical track record in practice when it comes to things like human rights and morality, so it's not wrong to be suspicious of it. But that slogan? There's nothing inherently communistic about it. It's the kind of bland platitude that almost any political movement could at least pretend to espouse, with roughly similar amounts of fudging and equivocation. Capitalism, for example, ideally has everyone contributing what they can (according to their ability) to receive in trade the ability to meet their needs. We can certainly disagree about the best way to attain these goals, but who could seriously object to a principle of people contributing what they can and getting what they need? So what disturbs me about the first example is that a general goal that would seem to be uncontroversially good is rejected as bad because of its association with an arguably bad political ideology. It's as if my friend thinks that, to be good champions of freedom, we have a moral duty to deny people what they need, and encourage people to contribute less.
The second example is even more bizarre, and seems to come from a different pathology, one I've referred to before in this blog. Charitably, I think my interlocutor might have been saying that I shouldn't falsely put on the façade of a good person when in fact I'm not. But I can't imagine how one would go about trying to be a good person without trying to act like one. And so the admonishment that I shouldn't act like a good person seemed to be just plain perverse.
I realize this isn't entirely a new thing. People have been disparaging virtuous behaviour in various ways forever. But somehow the tone seems a little different from the old "goody two-shoes" insult I remember from my youth. That was more about the belief that being "good" was unrealistic, that being a grownup meant having a more nuanced and pragmatic approach than just naively following The Rules like an obedient child. What I'm seeing now, in the anti-virtue-signalling "don't act like you're good" sentiment, has more bitterness to it. It's like a resentment at being made to look bad by someone else being good.
I don't mean to imply that I think I am virtuous in my words and deeds. Not at all. I try to be, but I am not anywhere near as successful in this as I would like. I'm not really talking about me personally in any event; what I'm troubled by is the form of the argument as I've encountered it, and as I've seen it used on others. What kind of words and deed do we have a moral duty to perform? Is it wrong to express aspirations to "good" behaviour or principles if, in so doing, we make someone else look bad? Does that mean we have a duty to look as bad or worse than other people? Really, what's wrong with wanting to do good?
Example One: A friend was complaining about the previous provincial government, and claimed they were trying to turn Alberta into a communist state. I asked him to elaborate, and he said something about the old communist slogan, "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need." Not that the NDP government ever cited that slogan, mind you. Just that he seemed to think they adhered to that as an ideal, and so that made them communist and therefore bad.
Example Two: In another conversation with a complete stranger online who expressed the opinion that racists and fascists deserved to die, when I said I didn't care what they deserved and the reason to oppose them is to protect their victims, not to mete out just deserts to people we think deserve punishment, he said, and I quote "You're not a good person, don't act like it."
I can sort of understand at least some of the genesis of the first example. Communism does not exactly have a great historical track record in practice when it comes to things like human rights and morality, so it's not wrong to be suspicious of it. But that slogan? There's nothing inherently communistic about it. It's the kind of bland platitude that almost any political movement could at least pretend to espouse, with roughly similar amounts of fudging and equivocation. Capitalism, for example, ideally has everyone contributing what they can (according to their ability) to receive in trade the ability to meet their needs. We can certainly disagree about the best way to attain these goals, but who could seriously object to a principle of people contributing what they can and getting what they need? So what disturbs me about the first example is that a general goal that would seem to be uncontroversially good is rejected as bad because of its association with an arguably bad political ideology. It's as if my friend thinks that, to be good champions of freedom, we have a moral duty to deny people what they need, and encourage people to contribute less.
The second example is even more bizarre, and seems to come from a different pathology, one I've referred to before in this blog. Charitably, I think my interlocutor might have been saying that I shouldn't falsely put on the façade of a good person when in fact I'm not. But I can't imagine how one would go about trying to be a good person without trying to act like one. And so the admonishment that I shouldn't act like a good person seemed to be just plain perverse.
I realize this isn't entirely a new thing. People have been disparaging virtuous behaviour in various ways forever. But somehow the tone seems a little different from the old "goody two-shoes" insult I remember from my youth. That was more about the belief that being "good" was unrealistic, that being a grownup meant having a more nuanced and pragmatic approach than just naively following The Rules like an obedient child. What I'm seeing now, in the anti-virtue-signalling "don't act like you're good" sentiment, has more bitterness to it. It's like a resentment at being made to look bad by someone else being good.
I don't mean to imply that I think I am virtuous in my words and deeds. Not at all. I try to be, but I am not anywhere near as successful in this as I would like. I'm not really talking about me personally in any event; what I'm troubled by is the form of the argument as I've encountered it, and as I've seen it used on others. What kind of words and deed do we have a moral duty to perform? Is it wrong to express aspirations to "good" behaviour or principles if, in so doing, we make someone else look bad? Does that mean we have a duty to look as bad or worse than other people? Really, what's wrong with wanting to do good?
Wednesday, 21 August 2019
We can't work with this guy.
Dear America (and especially members of Congress and the Cabinet):
I'm just a private Canadian citizen with no role in government or official position, which means I can say things which for reasons of diplomatic propriety the leaders of nations can't. What I say has no impact other than to simply place an idea in your head, which you can assess on its own merits and either adopt as your own or discard as you see fit. But I hope you will consider it seriously.
We (the other countries of the world) have all sorts of relations with the United States, whether as adversaries, rivals, or allies or trading partners, and in all of these it's really important that the United States be able to say something and have it be believed. When you make a trade deal or a treaty, you need your trading partners to expect you to keep your end of the bargain or they won't bother. Even if you want to deceive an enemy, it's really helpful if they have some reason to believe you usually tell the truth.
And that's the problem. This guy you have as your President right now? We can't trust a word he says. I honestly don't know if he's lying or if he actually believes the absurd falsehoods he tells when he tells them, but it doesn't matter: he is just so fundamentally unreliable in everything he says that we cannot accept his assertions, we cannot trust his promises, and we cannot fear his threats.
I'm not going to comment on impeachment or the 2020 election. That's your problem, and not something we foreigners can or should get involved in. But your Constitution includes provision for what to do when the President is incapable of carrying out his duties, and it is clear to me that, at least when it comes to foreign relations, your President is incapable of carrying out his duties, because we cannot trust his word on anything.
I'm just a private Canadian citizen with no role in government or official position, which means I can say things which for reasons of diplomatic propriety the leaders of nations can't. What I say has no impact other than to simply place an idea in your head, which you can assess on its own merits and either adopt as your own or discard as you see fit. But I hope you will consider it seriously.
We (the other countries of the world) have all sorts of relations with the United States, whether as adversaries, rivals, or allies or trading partners, and in all of these it's really important that the United States be able to say something and have it be believed. When you make a trade deal or a treaty, you need your trading partners to expect you to keep your end of the bargain or they won't bother. Even if you want to deceive an enemy, it's really helpful if they have some reason to believe you usually tell the truth.
And that's the problem. This guy you have as your President right now? We can't trust a word he says. I honestly don't know if he's lying or if he actually believes the absurd falsehoods he tells when he tells them, but it doesn't matter: he is just so fundamentally unreliable in everything he says that we cannot accept his assertions, we cannot trust his promises, and we cannot fear his threats.
I'm not going to comment on impeachment or the 2020 election. That's your problem, and not something we foreigners can or should get involved in. But your Constitution includes provision for what to do when the President is incapable of carrying out his duties, and it is clear to me that, at least when it comes to foreign relations, your President is incapable of carrying out his duties, because we cannot trust his word on anything.
Tuesday, 13 August 2019
An Addictive Policy
In a recent post I mentioned a game system I designed. I've actually got a fair bit of mileage out of that experience, and ended up writing my MA thesis on something I call the detection principle. Simply put, it's the idea that if you want to enforce a rule, you need to have some way of detecting when people break it, and it's most efficient to have the voluntary assistance of the people most immediately harmed by the violation of the rule.
A simple example: Suppose we noticed a problem with unsightly and unsanitary bloody noses. So we pass a law that says anyone sporting a bloody nose will be fined $100, thinking that maybe that deterrent will encourage people to avoid getting bloody noses.
At first, maybe it has a slightly salutary effect in some cases. We find that people invest in carrying tissues or otherwise take steps to stop their nosebleeds quicker, or at least slip away to address them in private where they're less likely to be liable to the fine. But soon we find that a particular type of nosebleed becomes more common: people are getting punched in the nose.
Well, we can't have that. Our law has been effective at reducing the reports of most other kinds of nosebleeds, but these miscreants are ruining everything by getting themselves punched. So maybe we need to raise the fine, because clearly the $100 deterrent isn't enough to keep these people from bleeding all over the place.
That doesn't seem to work though. If anything, it causes more people to get punched. After all, someone who's inclined to hurt you in the first place by punching you now has a force multiplier: they can punch you and force you to pay a fine for being punched!
Okay, that's no good. Obviously punching people should be deterred, too. So we'll make them liable as well. Except that doesn't really help much. The punching goes underground. We're still catching people for being punched, but mostly on anonymous tips, often (we suspect but cannot prove) from the people who punched them in the first place.
The policy is obviously stupid in this thought experiment. We recognize that the victim of a punching is not culpable for bleeding, and that punishing them just deters them from cooperating in our efforts to catch the puncher. And that makes the overall problem of punching worse, which is why I titled this essay "An Addictive Policy"; a mild dose of the perceived remedy to the problem makes the problem worse, so it "needs" a stronger and stronger and stronger dose, none of which actually helps but just convinces us that we absolutely cannot afford to reduce the dose. We're already doing all we can, and look how bad the problem is! Just imagine how much worse it would be if we stopped!
We don't do this with nose-punching, but we apply almost as stupid and every bit as damaging an approach to illegal immigration. It's perhaps not quite so obvious, because one can argue that an immigrant chooses to cross the border and take work illegally, but the power dynamic is almost identical. Employers may feign being shocked -- shocked! -- to learn that some of their employees are here illegally, but they choose to hire them, and for very good reason: they're cheaper. And they're cheaper because they can't tell anyone if you pay them less than the legal minimum wage, or if you opt not to spend money on expensive legally required workplace safety regulations.
I am convinced that this is deliberate. Employers want to be able to evade labour laws; they want to be able to pay people less than minimum wage, and they want to be exempt from workplace safety laws. And it's very much worth their while to scream and yell in the public square about how those horrible, horrible immigrants are coming here and stealing jobs and spreading disease and violating our sovereignty and breaking our laws, and we need to really really crack down and build a wall and get rid of them all. They know perfectly well that a wall won't keep anyone out, and that there will always be desperate and disadvantaged people in the country illegally that they can exploit for cheap labour, especially if those desperate and disadvantaged people are deterred from letting anyone see their noses bleed.
I argue that if you really want to stop illegal immigrants from taking jobs, you need to enlist their help in detecting and punishing the people who hire them. That means you need to stop treating the immigrant as the criminal. Sure, they crossed the border without permission. This is what lawyers call a malum prohibitum (wrong simply because it has been prohibited by the legislature), as distinct from a malum in se (inherently evil). If the legislature decided to allow crossing the border without permission, there'd be no reason whatsoever to be angry at someone who did so, and nothing to deter said person from reporting anyone who paid them less than minimum wage, or who failed to ensure proper workplace safety. Ensure that everyone who works here enjoys the same protections, and there will be no incentive for employers to prefer hiring non-citizens who don't.
A simple example: Suppose we noticed a problem with unsightly and unsanitary bloody noses. So we pass a law that says anyone sporting a bloody nose will be fined $100, thinking that maybe that deterrent will encourage people to avoid getting bloody noses.
At first, maybe it has a slightly salutary effect in some cases. We find that people invest in carrying tissues or otherwise take steps to stop their nosebleeds quicker, or at least slip away to address them in private where they're less likely to be liable to the fine. But soon we find that a particular type of nosebleed becomes more common: people are getting punched in the nose.
Well, we can't have that. Our law has been effective at reducing the reports of most other kinds of nosebleeds, but these miscreants are ruining everything by getting themselves punched. So maybe we need to raise the fine, because clearly the $100 deterrent isn't enough to keep these people from bleeding all over the place.
That doesn't seem to work though. If anything, it causes more people to get punched. After all, someone who's inclined to hurt you in the first place by punching you now has a force multiplier: they can punch you and force you to pay a fine for being punched!
Okay, that's no good. Obviously punching people should be deterred, too. So we'll make them liable as well. Except that doesn't really help much. The punching goes underground. We're still catching people for being punched, but mostly on anonymous tips, often (we suspect but cannot prove) from the people who punched them in the first place.
The policy is obviously stupid in this thought experiment. We recognize that the victim of a punching is not culpable for bleeding, and that punishing them just deters them from cooperating in our efforts to catch the puncher. And that makes the overall problem of punching worse, which is why I titled this essay "An Addictive Policy"; a mild dose of the perceived remedy to the problem makes the problem worse, so it "needs" a stronger and stronger and stronger dose, none of which actually helps but just convinces us that we absolutely cannot afford to reduce the dose. We're already doing all we can, and look how bad the problem is! Just imagine how much worse it would be if we stopped!
We don't do this with nose-punching, but we apply almost as stupid and every bit as damaging an approach to illegal immigration. It's perhaps not quite so obvious, because one can argue that an immigrant chooses to cross the border and take work illegally, but the power dynamic is almost identical. Employers may feign being shocked -- shocked! -- to learn that some of their employees are here illegally, but they choose to hire them, and for very good reason: they're cheaper. And they're cheaper because they can't tell anyone if you pay them less than the legal minimum wage, or if you opt not to spend money on expensive legally required workplace safety regulations.
I am convinced that this is deliberate. Employers want to be able to evade labour laws; they want to be able to pay people less than minimum wage, and they want to be exempt from workplace safety laws. And it's very much worth their while to scream and yell in the public square about how those horrible, horrible immigrants are coming here and stealing jobs and spreading disease and violating our sovereignty and breaking our laws, and we need to really really crack down and build a wall and get rid of them all. They know perfectly well that a wall won't keep anyone out, and that there will always be desperate and disadvantaged people in the country illegally that they can exploit for cheap labour, especially if those desperate and disadvantaged people are deterred from letting anyone see their noses bleed.
I argue that if you really want to stop illegal immigrants from taking jobs, you need to enlist their help in detecting and punishing the people who hire them. That means you need to stop treating the immigrant as the criminal. Sure, they crossed the border without permission. This is what lawyers call a malum prohibitum (wrong simply because it has been prohibited by the legislature), as distinct from a malum in se (inherently evil). If the legislature decided to allow crossing the border without permission, there'd be no reason whatsoever to be angry at someone who did so, and nothing to deter said person from reporting anyone who paid them less than minimum wage, or who failed to ensure proper workplace safety. Ensure that everyone who works here enjoys the same protections, and there will be no incentive for employers to prefer hiring non-citizens who don't.
Wednesday, 7 August 2019
Reply to "9 Big Questions About Democratic Socialism"
A friend with whom I frequently argue posted this link recently, and I wanted to address the questions it raises.
1. What is the moral basis for taxing some incomes at higher rates than others?
There's a subtle trick in this question. It's certainly true that equal incomes ought presumptively to be taxed at equal rates, and that we should provide some kind of moral justification for deviating from this. But it's not at all clear that we should expect unequal incomes to be taxed at equal rates.
To illustrate, let's step back a moment, and consider the head tax, almost universally recognized as deeply unjust. If everyone were required to pay exactly $1000 tax, regardless of their income, that would quite clearly be unaffordably burdensome for the poorest taxpayer, while utterly inconsequential to the richest. Both are paying an equal amount, but the burden is nowhere near equal. Most people would agree that "equal" does not mean "fair" when we're talking about the absolute amount of tax paid.
So why should we assume that equality of rate is the fairest approach? It's certainly fairer than a head tax, but is it perfectly fair, such that we need to provide a moral justification for deviating from it?
I have argued on this very blog quite often that it is not. The short answer to the question, then, is that no justification is required to treat different incomes differently according to their differences.
2. Do we imagine that incomes are entirely the result of some random process?
No, of course not. But neither are they entirely independent of random chance and unearned advantages. Pretending that all inequality of income is 100% deserved is just as ridiculous as pretending that none of it is deserved.
I tend to think, though, that bickering about what people deserve is a waste of time. I don't care if the poor deserve to be poor or the rich deserve to be rich; I want a system in which all humans enjoy the greatest freedom and quality of live possible, no matter how much we might deserve to be punished with eternal misery for our original sin. Indeed, it's kind of arrogant to try to argue for or against any economic system based on one's eminently fallible and inherently biased personal judgments about what people deserve.
3. Do we understand that people with high incomes are the most mobile people on earth and that such persons are most able to leave one tax regime for another?
I've seen this argument before. If we raise taxes on the rich, they'll just pick up and move somewhere where they can pay lower taxes.
Oh no. They'll take all those dollars somewhere else, and we'll only be left with our land and natural resources, our buildings and infrastructure, and our labour force! Whatever shall we DO!?
(This is actually a bigger problem for the rich person moving abroad than it is for us. Either they exchange their Canadian dollars for the currency of the lower-tax jurisdiction, and those dollars come back as foreigners spend them to buy Canadian stuff, or they just hang onto them and don't spend them and soon discover that money is useless by itself, while we print new money to mediate our own transactions.)
Yes, people with high incomes often have valuable skills and it might be a shame to lose them, but if those skills tend to be focused around how to squeeze the biggest share of the surplus value of trade from a transaction, it's not necessarily such a bad thing if they take those skills elsewhere.
Have some faith in the free market. If we find that we really desperately need more surgeons, we'll start offering them more money to come here and work, taxes and all. The skilled people we need to attract, the market will attract. But we don't need to attract people whose primary skill is gaming the system to concentrate wealth in their own hands.
4. Related to question 3, do we realize that governments exist in a competitive landscape, very much like businesses do?
The core of this, related to question 3, is the premise that governments are competing to attract the wealthy people to come live in their territories and pay taxes. But this is only incidentally true, and it's grave mistake to structure your whole idea of government around this objective. Governments compete for all sorts of reasons -- territory, scarce resources, access to markets, prestige -- and competing to attract investment capital is just one of many ways they may or may not compete, depending on scarcity and demand.
But all of these things are incidental to the role of a sovereign government, which is constitutionally incompatible with competition. At its core, a democratic government is simply the means by which a population organizes itself and resolves internal conflicts about what is to be done. In practice, it usually needs material resources and labour to carry out its policies, and so yes, it does compete both within and without its sovereign territory for the things it needs, but its main task is governing, and if it is to be sovereign, it must have no competition in this role.
I've written about this before, but if you really want to think of a government as a business, then you should think of citizens as shareholders, not customers. A government's responsibility is to its shareholders, not to its customers, and while it might compete with other entities for customers, it really makes very little sense to think of it competing for shareholders. And if all the shareholders decide to liquidate their shares and go invest their liberty with some other government, so be it.
5. Do we have a right to treat wealthy individuals and organizations as a resource for our benefit?
Individuals? No, of course not. Organizations? Well, yeah.
In nature, there's no such thing as a corporation. Corporations exist entirely as creatures of law; they are ways of organizing our activities to facilitate achieving certain goals. You don't have an inalienable right to form a corporation; you are given that option by a sovereign government enacting legislation allowing the creation of corporations (and other organizations, such as non-profit societies, for example) and the government can attach any conditions it wants. Want to form a corporation so you can raise capital to build a factory and manufacture widgets without exposing your personal assets to liability risks? Cool, go ahead, the government will protect this bundle of rights here, and you need to divert this proportion of your profits to government coffers.
6. Will democratic socialism damage innovation and economic growth?
The article doesn't clearly define "democratic socialism", but the answer it offers to this question seems to equate it with "steeply progressive tax rates". I'll quote it in its entirety to respond fairly.
First, progressive tax rates are not a disincentive to earn more money, because there is no point at which earning an extra dollar fails to put at least some money in your pocket. Rather, the incentive to earn an extra dollar diminishes, the more you earn.
Second, remember that taxes are assessed on profits, which are calculated after deducting expenses. And money invested in R&D, to develop risky but potentially lucrative new products, counts as an expense.
Third, a low tax rate doesn't necessarily encourage innovation, at least not of the sort we want to encourage. There are two principle ways to profit from investment, when you buy shares, for example: income (dividends, for example) or growth (capital gains). If the tax on income is very low, you might well prefer to opt for the "conservative returned from known methods and products" since you know you can keep most or all of those proceeds. Why bother risking putting all those profits into R&D when you know you can keep pulling out cash now, especially if capital gains taxes are relatively higher? So whether sharply progressive taxes inhibit or encourage innovation depends on a lot of other factors.
7. Why do we prize many other kinds of freedom more than economic freedom?
Where to begin? I guess my first observation is that this is just so vague as to be meaningless. What on earth is meant by "economic freedom" as distinct from "other kinds of freedom"? I would argue that most freedoms are economic freedoms, or are at least heavily impacted by economics. Someone with money has, in practice, more freedom of speech than someone without. Someone with money has more ability to cast a ballot that will be counted. Someone with money will find it much easier to stay out of jail than someone without. And recursively, someone with money will find it much easier to exercise their economic freedom to earn more money than someone without.
So I would turn this question around: why do you want to prize some people's economic freedom at the expense of everyone else's?
8. Do we really need higher taxes or do we need to rethink the way we spend our money now?
Yes to both. We always need to rethink the way we spend our money, because that's always going to be an ongoing, self-renewing problem. But we do need higher taxes, particularly on the wealth, and for reasons that really have nothing at all to do with funding government, because...
9. Are we getting taxation wrong?
...yes, we are absolutely getting taxation very very wrong. Taxation is not, contrary to all our intuitions, about funding the government. At least not the federal government. It is to some extent about funding provincial and municipal governments, but the federal government is the one that issues currency; it can in principle print all the money it wants, but it really shouldn't just do so with wild abandon because that will lead to hyperinflation. So taxation is really about preventing that, not funding the government.
In the post before this one, I talked about how the sovereign actually has practical ownership of everything. Consider that for a moment, in the big picture: Parliament can in principle pass a law imposing any rules it wants on how any given object, commodity or land can or can't be used. If parliament passes a law saying you must eat this apple and I must not, any talk about me owning this apple is essentially meaningless. Now, it's certainly true that we have a written constitution that prevents Parliament from certain sorts of enactments, but the Constitution itself is an Act of Parliament with an amending formula. In this context, it makes sense to say that the property laws in effect within Canada by which I can meaningfully claim this apple is mine and not yours are really just the system of rules that the sovereign has chosen to apply in deciding how its apples are to be used.
And so, paying people to build bridges or serve in the military or manage fisheries is just the way that the sovereign has chosen to effect its will. The sovereign wants these things done; it could pass a law requiring people to build bridges, but finds that it is more effective to use a money system instead. Money's a fine system, but it takes a certain amount of maintenance to keep it functioning smoothly, and taxation is part of that. Not to provide the money for the government to spend, but to keep it circulating.
We tend to think of money as some scarce good that we need more of, and on an individual level that's probably how we ought to think of it, or it won't work the way it's supposed to. But on the national level, the level of making policy and debating the ethics of taxation, it's dead wrong. One can criticize any tax policy as bad policy and likely to fail, but when we talk about it violating people's property rights to money they've earned, we're getting taxation very wrong.
1. What is the moral basis for taxing some incomes at higher rates than others?
There's a subtle trick in this question. It's certainly true that equal incomes ought presumptively to be taxed at equal rates, and that we should provide some kind of moral justification for deviating from this. But it's not at all clear that we should expect unequal incomes to be taxed at equal rates.
To illustrate, let's step back a moment, and consider the head tax, almost universally recognized as deeply unjust. If everyone were required to pay exactly $1000 tax, regardless of their income, that would quite clearly be unaffordably burdensome for the poorest taxpayer, while utterly inconsequential to the richest. Both are paying an equal amount, but the burden is nowhere near equal. Most people would agree that "equal" does not mean "fair" when we're talking about the absolute amount of tax paid.
So why should we assume that equality of rate is the fairest approach? It's certainly fairer than a head tax, but is it perfectly fair, such that we need to provide a moral justification for deviating from it?
I have argued on this very blog quite often that it is not. The short answer to the question, then, is that no justification is required to treat different incomes differently according to their differences.
2. Do we imagine that incomes are entirely the result of some random process?
No, of course not. But neither are they entirely independent of random chance and unearned advantages. Pretending that all inequality of income is 100% deserved is just as ridiculous as pretending that none of it is deserved.
I tend to think, though, that bickering about what people deserve is a waste of time. I don't care if the poor deserve to be poor or the rich deserve to be rich; I want a system in which all humans enjoy the greatest freedom and quality of live possible, no matter how much we might deserve to be punished with eternal misery for our original sin. Indeed, it's kind of arrogant to try to argue for or against any economic system based on one's eminently fallible and inherently biased personal judgments about what people deserve.
3. Do we understand that people with high incomes are the most mobile people on earth and that such persons are most able to leave one tax regime for another?
I've seen this argument before. If we raise taxes on the rich, they'll just pick up and move somewhere where they can pay lower taxes.
Oh no. They'll take all those dollars somewhere else, and we'll only be left with our land and natural resources, our buildings and infrastructure, and our labour force! Whatever shall we DO!?
(This is actually a bigger problem for the rich person moving abroad than it is for us. Either they exchange their Canadian dollars for the currency of the lower-tax jurisdiction, and those dollars come back as foreigners spend them to buy Canadian stuff, or they just hang onto them and don't spend them and soon discover that money is useless by itself, while we print new money to mediate our own transactions.)
Yes, people with high incomes often have valuable skills and it might be a shame to lose them, but if those skills tend to be focused around how to squeeze the biggest share of the surplus value of trade from a transaction, it's not necessarily such a bad thing if they take those skills elsewhere.
Have some faith in the free market. If we find that we really desperately need more surgeons, we'll start offering them more money to come here and work, taxes and all. The skilled people we need to attract, the market will attract. But we don't need to attract people whose primary skill is gaming the system to concentrate wealth in their own hands.
4. Related to question 3, do we realize that governments exist in a competitive landscape, very much like businesses do?
The core of this, related to question 3, is the premise that governments are competing to attract the wealthy people to come live in their territories and pay taxes. But this is only incidentally true, and it's grave mistake to structure your whole idea of government around this objective. Governments compete for all sorts of reasons -- territory, scarce resources, access to markets, prestige -- and competing to attract investment capital is just one of many ways they may or may not compete, depending on scarcity and demand.
But all of these things are incidental to the role of a sovereign government, which is constitutionally incompatible with competition. At its core, a democratic government is simply the means by which a population organizes itself and resolves internal conflicts about what is to be done. In practice, it usually needs material resources and labour to carry out its policies, and so yes, it does compete both within and without its sovereign territory for the things it needs, but its main task is governing, and if it is to be sovereign, it must have no competition in this role.
I've written about this before, but if you really want to think of a government as a business, then you should think of citizens as shareholders, not customers. A government's responsibility is to its shareholders, not to its customers, and while it might compete with other entities for customers, it really makes very little sense to think of it competing for shareholders. And if all the shareholders decide to liquidate their shares and go invest their liberty with some other government, so be it.
5. Do we have a right to treat wealthy individuals and organizations as a resource for our benefit?
Individuals? No, of course not. Organizations? Well, yeah.
In nature, there's no such thing as a corporation. Corporations exist entirely as creatures of law; they are ways of organizing our activities to facilitate achieving certain goals. You don't have an inalienable right to form a corporation; you are given that option by a sovereign government enacting legislation allowing the creation of corporations (and other organizations, such as non-profit societies, for example) and the government can attach any conditions it wants. Want to form a corporation so you can raise capital to build a factory and manufacture widgets without exposing your personal assets to liability risks? Cool, go ahead, the government will protect this bundle of rights here, and you need to divert this proportion of your profits to government coffers.
6. Will democratic socialism damage innovation and economic growth?
The article doesn't clearly define "democratic socialism", but the answer it offers to this question seems to equate it with "steeply progressive tax rates". I'll quote it in its entirety to respond fairly.
"Steeply progressive tax rates provide a substantial disincentive to earn income above a certain level. The natural result would be to opt for more conservative returns from known methods and products. There is little reason to take risks for breakout success when the profits will be subject to a confiscatory rate."Seems superficially plausible, but there are a number of mistakes here.
First, progressive tax rates are not a disincentive to earn more money, because there is no point at which earning an extra dollar fails to put at least some money in your pocket. Rather, the incentive to earn an extra dollar diminishes, the more you earn.
Second, remember that taxes are assessed on profits, which are calculated after deducting expenses. And money invested in R&D, to develop risky but potentially lucrative new products, counts as an expense.
Third, a low tax rate doesn't necessarily encourage innovation, at least not of the sort we want to encourage. There are two principle ways to profit from investment, when you buy shares, for example: income (dividends, for example) or growth (capital gains). If the tax on income is very low, you might well prefer to opt for the "conservative returned from known methods and products" since you know you can keep most or all of those proceeds. Why bother risking putting all those profits into R&D when you know you can keep pulling out cash now, especially if capital gains taxes are relatively higher? So whether sharply progressive taxes inhibit or encourage innovation depends on a lot of other factors.
7. Why do we prize many other kinds of freedom more than economic freedom?
Where to begin? I guess my first observation is that this is just so vague as to be meaningless. What on earth is meant by "economic freedom" as distinct from "other kinds of freedom"? I would argue that most freedoms are economic freedoms, or are at least heavily impacted by economics. Someone with money has, in practice, more freedom of speech than someone without. Someone with money has more ability to cast a ballot that will be counted. Someone with money will find it much easier to stay out of jail than someone without. And recursively, someone with money will find it much easier to exercise their economic freedom to earn more money than someone without.
So I would turn this question around: why do you want to prize some people's economic freedom at the expense of everyone else's?
8. Do we really need higher taxes or do we need to rethink the way we spend our money now?
Yes to both. We always need to rethink the way we spend our money, because that's always going to be an ongoing, self-renewing problem. But we do need higher taxes, particularly on the wealth, and for reasons that really have nothing at all to do with funding government, because...
9. Are we getting taxation wrong?
...yes, we are absolutely getting taxation very very wrong. Taxation is not, contrary to all our intuitions, about funding the government. At least not the federal government. It is to some extent about funding provincial and municipal governments, but the federal government is the one that issues currency; it can in principle print all the money it wants, but it really shouldn't just do so with wild abandon because that will lead to hyperinflation. So taxation is really about preventing that, not funding the government.
In the post before this one, I talked about how the sovereign actually has practical ownership of everything. Consider that for a moment, in the big picture: Parliament can in principle pass a law imposing any rules it wants on how any given object, commodity or land can or can't be used. If parliament passes a law saying you must eat this apple and I must not, any talk about me owning this apple is essentially meaningless. Now, it's certainly true that we have a written constitution that prevents Parliament from certain sorts of enactments, but the Constitution itself is an Act of Parliament with an amending formula. In this context, it makes sense to say that the property laws in effect within Canada by which I can meaningfully claim this apple is mine and not yours are really just the system of rules that the sovereign has chosen to apply in deciding how its apples are to be used.
And so, paying people to build bridges or serve in the military or manage fisheries is just the way that the sovereign has chosen to effect its will. The sovereign wants these things done; it could pass a law requiring people to build bridges, but finds that it is more effective to use a money system instead. Money's a fine system, but it takes a certain amount of maintenance to keep it functioning smoothly, and taxation is part of that. Not to provide the money for the government to spend, but to keep it circulating.
We tend to think of money as some scarce good that we need more of, and on an individual level that's probably how we ought to think of it, or it won't work the way it's supposed to. But on the national level, the level of making policy and debating the ethics of taxation, it's dead wrong. One can criticize any tax policy as bad policy and likely to fail, but when we talk about it violating people's property rights to money they've earned, we're getting taxation very wrong.
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